Tag Archives: localist programme

Colin Hinesdescribes the open borders to movement of people within Europe as undemocratic and anti-internationalist, stealing the brightest and the best from poorer countries.

Britain is the world’s second largest importer of health workers after the US, including more than 48,000 doctors and 86,000 nurses in 2014, despite the fact that in 2010, along with all WHO members, the UK signed the ‘Global Code of Practise on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel’, which ‘encourages countries to improve their health workforce planning and respond to their future needs without relying unduly on the training efforts of other countries, particularly low-income countries suffering from acute shortages’.

Crucially the recipient countries must rapidly train enough doctors and nurses for example from their own population to prevent the shameful theft of such vital staff from the poorer counties which originally paid for their education.

Migration’s boost to population levels in the richer countries results in a larger ‘ecological footprint’ than would otherwise be the case. An ecological footprint is the measure of human impact on the Earths ecosystems. WWF defines it as ‘the impact of human activities measured in terms of the area of biologically productive land and water required to produce the goods consumed and to assimilate the wastes generated.

The crucial thing is to tackle the root cause of why people leave their friends and culture in the first place.This is normally because their economic prospects or level of personal safety are bad enough to force them to emigrate. The replacement of the present system, code name international competitiveness, which pits nation states against nation states in economic warfare, and export led growth will both be drastically reduced as the emphasis shifts to protecting and rebuilding local economies.

Since 2004 there has been a rapid and uncontrollable rise in immigration as millions of workers from the new member states in Eastern Europe came to Western Europe. In the UK, a favourite destination, the number of East Europeans here has increased by nearly one million since 2004, when it stood at 167,000. This has led to increased pressure on local services and housing, and a downward pressure on the wages of the unskilled in particular.

In a dense, long and fully referenced chapter Hines points out that these large-scale migrations occurred at a time when on average, between 65-70% of households in 25 high-income economies experienced stagnant or falling real incomes between 2005 and 2014. The income of the bottom 90% of their populations has stagnated for over 30 years. This has unsurprisingly led to a political backlash.

Progressive Protectionism aims to reduce permanently the amount of international trade in goods, money and services and to enable nation states to decide the level of migration that their citizens desire. This would take our continent into a new more hopeful future by offering the majority a localist programme that the left, green and small ‘c’ conservatives could unite around, bringing a sense of economic security and controlled immigration, similar to that enjoyed in Western Europe during the fifties, sixties and early seventies.